"He was an incredible songwriter and guitarist. He was my closest and oldest friend. He was a funny, intelligent and sweet man and he leaves an enormous void in all of our lives."

Architects guitarist Tom Searle passed away this weekend following a three year battle with cancer. He was 28-years-old.

Tom founded the Brighton metalcore band in 2004 along with his twin brother Dan, who broke the news on Facebook yesterday. "It is with unbelievable pain and sadness that I have to announce that at around twelve minutes past midnight on 20 August my amazing brother, Tom, passed away after living with cancer for more than three years," he wrote. "He was an incredible songwriter and guitarist. He was my closest and oldest friend. He was a funny, intelligent and sweet man and he leaves an enormous void in all of our lives."

Tom was absent from the past fifteen months of Architects' shows due to receiving cancer treatment. The band cancalled a European festival tour and a headline US tour earlier this year after Tom was taken to hospital in Luxembourg on June 8 and placed in a medically induced coma the following day. Dan wrote: "The doctors told us that it was unlikely that they’d ever be able to wake him. Five days later, against all the odds, he was awake again, and in a few short days following that, myself and Tom cancelled the air ambulance that was due to take him home and we got the Eurostar train home. Classic Tom Searle." However, the drummer said Tom's condition deteriorated over the last two weeks.

The band released their seventh album All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us in May this year. They will continue on their tour with a UK and European headline slot starting in October and will travel to Australia in a few weeks, but Dan is unsure where things will go from there.

"I don’t know what will become of Architects. Me and Tom started playing in a band together when we were 13 and, really, Architects is just an evolution of the band that we started all the way back then, over half my life ago. To pretend that Tom wasn’t at the heart of everything that the band created would be to show a complete lack of respect to the amazing talent that he was. The band will never be the same and there is simply no denying it."

"We want to carry on, that is important to say, and we will strive to do so, but we will not release any music unless we truly believe that it is something that Tom would have been proud of. Whether or not we can achieve that is something that we will have to discover in time."

Read the full post below.

It is with unbelievable pain and sadness that I have to announce that at around twelve minutes past midnight on August...